One of John Adams's sons was a bad boy on campus

No, not John Quincy Adams, but Charles Adams. J.L. Bell is recounting Good Time Charlie's problems while attending Harvard. Why, at one pre-Thanksgiving feast, he was one of several students who were "extremely disorderly and riotous, making tumultuous and indecent noises, breaking the windows of the Hall, throwing the benches out of the windows into the yard &c."

Charles was an alcoholic, disowned by his father, who died of cirrhossis at age 30.

Nabby's husband was unstable, disappearing for years at time, and he lost his inheritance on investment scams. Nabby and her kids had to live in a cottage on the grounds of a debtor's prison for a while. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in her 40s, underwent a mastectomy without anesthesia, yet died not long after.

Thomas Boylston Adams was marginally less tragic; he was able to marry and have a number of children, some of whom had decent lives. But he was also an alcoholic, described by others in his family as melancholic and a bully. His brief law practice failed. He won a seat in the Massachusetts legislature, but resigned a year later, probably because of his alcoholism.

When supposedly normal, ordinary people destroy their own lives due to stupid, asinine choices that they make, they don't deserve much sympathy, as far as I'm concerned. The fact that his law practice failed and ended up resigning his neat in the Massachusetts legislature due to alcoholism, etc., served him right.

Alcohol is a poison for many. It is poisonous in the same form as nicotine and heroin via the addictive attributes. At a time matching your attitude the assumption was that alcohol addiction represented a moral failing. That is a hunk of bs.

But there is a social disease maintained by many without any drugs: The lust for superiority which leads to claims of moral superiority such as the one you presented.